Review: David Byrne and St. Vincent at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

David Byrne and St. Vincent played Thursday in Portland.Andreas Laszlo Konrath

As a dancer, David Byrne lands somewhere between Fred Astaire and a Jazzercise instructor doing the robot. This is charming and perfect and one of his many talents that paired perfectly with Annie Clark (perhaps you know her as St. Vincent) on Thursday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

Backed by a drummer, a keyboard player and an eight-piece horn section that gave the night the feel of an art rock second line, Byrne and Clark went heavy into "Love This Giant," the record they released in September. Then they divvied up the rest of the 23-song set between their solo works. And Byrne pulled out some Talking Heads songs, because party.

The record is one of two projects Byrne is out on the road promoting. Tonight, he'll be at the Bagdad Theater for a sold-out conversation with Carrie Brownstein about his new book, "How Music Works." One of the ways it works is by thinking about it -- a lot. And "it" is far more than the music. It's also the presentation.

Of his early Talking Heads fashion, Byrne writes "At one point I decided my look would be, like our musical dogma, stripped down, in the sense that I would attempt to have no look at all."

The anti-look is still a look, an artistic decision and so -- importantly -- Thursday night's show was presented as much as played, and this was true before an instrument was picked up. And they had to be picked up, because as the nearly sold-out crowd arrived, all those many horns were set on the stage under spotlights. On the P.A., birds sang, thunder rumbled in the distance, and a rain shower came and went.

Nature's own concert was finally interrupted by Byrne's voice announcing that people were free to take video, audio, or pictures, but asking they please not do it on an iPad. They're big. "We hope you don't spend all your time enjoying the show with a gadget in front of your face," he said.

Then they took the stage and took to work, the band in black and white, Byrne in black with a grey vest and white shoes, Clark in blue. The opened with the first two tracks off their new record, "Who" and "Weekend In the Dust," every move by every musician choreographed. Byrne doing his rock nerd steps while Clark, shuffling about in the tiniest of steps, took on the look of a wind-up tin guitar hero.

Byrne was the the biggest star on the stage. The show had his sensibility all over it. Yet impressively, he was more than happy stepping back into formation with the horns and letting Clark work. He spent the entirety of one of her songs, "Cheerleader," laying on his side, occasionally lifting his upper body in the air.

And Clark was great.

They both were, working back and forth. In the first encore he followed her tune "Cruel" with "Burning Down the House." Though before either of those songs, she took a minute to talk about the moment when she first became enamored with Byrne. It was when "Burning Down the House" was featured in "Revenge of the Nerds."

Clark kicked off the second encore with a gorgeous version of "The Party," and he followed with more Talking Heads, "Road to Nowhere."

To the third encore, where the lesson was this: If you need to get on with your evening, if you need to get out of the arena, if you need to calm a full house down, hit 'em with weird.

"Open the Kingdom" happened when Philip Glass asked Byrne to write some lyrics. They played it, they bowed, and did their own little dances off stage.